It’s Wednesday, August 7th, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!
First up, if there’s nothing to Benghazigate…
…why the continuing concerted effort to avoid the truth? Seriously; aliases, dispersing people across the country and around the world…and the MSM doesn’t smell a story?!? No…nothing to see here, folks; move along!
In another scandal-related item, the WaPo‘s Marc Thiessen details…
How Obama’s IRS scandal harms national security
When President Obama dismisses the IRS’ political targeting of his conservative critics as a “phony scandal,” he is not only stretching credulity — he is undermining our nation’s security.
This week, we have had a chilling reminder of how real the al-Qaeda threat remains, when the government issued a worldwide terror alert that has closed U.S. embassies across the world. Reports indicate that a major terrorist attack may be imminent, citing increased “chatter” among senior al-Qaeda leaders.
Who monitors that “chatter”? The National Security Agency. Yet the House of Representatives just nearly stripped the NSA of one of its most vital terrorist surveillance tools. The measure failed by just seven votes — thanks to a collapse in public support for the NSA’s activities.
That collapse is a direct result of the disintegration in public trust that has taken place on Obama’s watch. Polls show that, for the first time in Obama’s presidency, half of all Americans say they don’t believe he is “honest and trustworthy” — a 9-point drop in trust since May, and a 27-point drop since Obama took office. Moreover, a majority of Americans say the IRS scandal has caused them to doubt the “overall honesty and integrity” of the Obama administration.
That is disastrous for our national security. The NSA’s activities must, by their nature, remain secret — which means they require a basic bond of trust between the people and their government. The Obama administration has broken that bond of trust. Little wonder, then, that so many Americans simply don’t believe it when Obama officials insist that the NSA is not monitoring the content of their calls and e-mails.
There is no evidence that anyone at the NSA intentionally and improperly searched the records of American citizens. Even Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, has not offered any proof that NSA officials abused the authority given them by Congress and the federal courts. Yet when NSA officials (correctly) point out that it would be illegal for them to monitor the content of Americans’ calls and e-mails, many respond that it is also illegal for the IRS to target conservative groups — yet the IRS did exactly that.
It’s not just the abuses at the IRS that have eroded trust. Many Americans see the IRS scandal as emblematic of an increasingly lawless administration.
When it comes to Egypt, the law clearly requires Obama cut off or at least suspend U.S. assistance following that country’s coup — but the president has refused to follow the law.
When it comes to Obamacare, nothing in the Affordable Care Act allows Obama to suspend or delay implementation of the employer mandate, so that it takes effect after the mid-term elections — yet Obama is doing exactly that.
When it comes to presidential appointments, the Constitution does not allow the president to make “recess appointments” when Congress is not in recess — yet Obama ignored the Constitution and made three “recess’ appointments to the National Labor Relations Board when Congress was in session, and saw his actions declared unconstitutional by the federal courts.
When it comes to immigration, Congress refused to pass Obama’s Dream Act, so Obama issued an executive order directing immigration officers to no longer deport an entire class of illegal immigrants who came here as children, regardless of individual circumstances, and to give them work-authorization permits.
Looking at this record of contempt for the law, it is little comfort for Americans to hear that it would be illegal for the NSA to spy on Americans. That never stopped Obama before, they say.
Of course the NSA is not spying on Americans; it is spying on al-Qaeda. (Says who?!?) Those very same NSA analysts who have been demonized in recent weeks as a threat to our civil liberties have just given us advance warning of one of the “most specific and credible threats” since 9/11. (Only if you believe the Administration’s line.)
They are not interested in the conversations of law abiding American citizens. (Unfortunately, it’s not the interests of the NSA which worry us.) The only domestic communications they care about are those of al-Qaeda leaders abroad talking to terrorist operatives deployed here at home. If such conversations are taking place, we need them to find out who that operative is, where he is and what he is planning. They cannot do that without the NSA’s metadata program.
Yet the House nearly eliminated that program, and there is a growing consensus that Congress will soon have to do something to respond to public outrage by reining in the NSA’s surveillance capabilities. That would be a tragedy. If it happens, the fault will lie with Obama’s serial abuses of the law. By breaking trust with the American people, Obama has exposed Americans to greater danger.
That is the real scandal. And there is nothing “phony” about it.
But once again, and only when it comes to The Dear Misleader, like Helen Keller and Joe Biden, the MSM is…
…deaf, blind and dumb.
Since we’re on the subject phony, as The Washington Free Beacon reports, the recent…
Next up, two items, from NRO and the WSJ respectively, confirming when it comes to Congress, very few “representatives of the people” actually have their constituents best-interests at heart:
Congress’s ObamaCare Exemption
The President intervenes to give Members and staff a break.
Combined with his refusal to enforce the fraud prevention features of the Unaffordable Healthcare Act, this latest high crime and misdemeanor on the part of The Great Prevaricator presents Senate and House Republicans with the perfect reason for refusing to fund ObamaScare; one which will truly resonate with voters in any showdown over a government shutdown. Again, fund the government; just not any portion of ObamaScare.
Unfortunately, despite the GOP’s cacophonous condemnations of this increasingly unpopular “legislation”, we’re betting they’ve neither the will nor the inclination to defund it.
Meanwhile, in Liberal Land, as James Taranto notes,…
It’s Always Selma Again
On the cheapening of civil-rights history.
Florida is the New Selma, and not for the first time. On a visit to Tallahassee Tuesday, Jesse Jackson “used the phrase ‘Selma of our time’–a reference to civil rights marches in Alabama that helped prompt change in the 1960s,” the Miami Herald reports.
By way of explanation, the paper quotes an earlier, ungrammatical comment the septuagenarian would-be provocateur made last month on CNN, where he “talked about an economic boycott to ‘isolate Florida as a kind of apartheid state given this whole stand your ground laws.’ “
It isn’t the first time Florida has been the New Selma. As National Review’s John Miller and Ramesh Ponnuru noted fully one-eighth of a century ago, George W. Bush’s thin margin of victory in the 2000 presidential election won the Sunshine State that designation as well. But if Florida is the New New Selma and was also the Old New Selma, there have also been other New Selmas over the years:
Houston was another Selma, too, back in March, when [Jackson] was fighting to preserve two race-preference programs (Houston Chronicle, March 11). A few months before that, the New York Times reported on Jackson’s efforts to win more lenient treatment for students who were being punished for fighting at a high school in Decatur, Illinois: Decatur was just like, you guessed it, Selma (December 12, 1999). In February 1999, Jackson found Selma in, of all places, Riverside, California, after an accidental police shooting. That’s four Selmas in less than two years.
Compiling a complete list of New Selmas would be a worthy project for some blogger. But Jackson’s Selma fixation is especially ironic in light of a March 1988 quote we found. At that time Jackson was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Don Wycliff, a member of the New York Times editorial board, penned an enthusiastic commentary titled “The New Jesse Jackson”:
“We the people cannot move forward by looking backward,” he said. “We must forgive each other, redeem each other and move on to a brighter tomorrow.” The lines were part of his standard speech in the days leading up to Super Tuesday.
They always came after he recounted a visit to Selma, Ala., where, Mr. Jackson said, the Mayor acknowledged he was “on the wrong side of history” on March 6, 1965 [sic; actually March 7]. That was Bloody Sunday, when the Alabama State Police ran riot over civil rights marchers in the climactic episode of the voting rights campaign. But that battle is over now, Mr. Jackson continued, and it is time to “forgive . . . redeem . . . move on.”
So 23 years after the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, it was time to move on–but now that another 25 years have passed–and, by the way, a black man has made it to the White House–everything’s coming up Selma.
Jackson is not alone in seeking to trivialize civil-rights history. As Commentary’s Seth Mandel noted the other day, Rep. John Lewis–who suffered a fractured skull when a racist mob beat him on Bloody Sunday–in 2008 scurrilously likened the McCain campaign’s criticism of Barack Obama to the Birmingham church bombings. Lewis has a long history of similar comparisons, and his undisputed heroism 48 years ago does not excuse his inflammatory and irresponsible rhetoric.
Some of the efforts to evoke the civil-rights movement today are downright laughable. The Washington Times–in a story reporting that the Smithsonian Institution is trying, no joke, to acquire the sweatshirt Trayvon Martin was wearing when George Zimmerman shot him in self-defense (See story below) –reports: “The National Museum of African American History and Culture is set to open in 2015 and will display objects related to the Civil Rights Movement, such as the handcuffs used to restrain Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.”
Was Gates arrested at Selma? Unlikely, since he was 14 at the time. It’s a safe bet the event in question is the one that happened in Cambridge, Mass., in 2009, when Gates was trying to break into his own home and a passerby mistook him for a burglar and summoned police. This column sympathized with Gates. But to characterize the kerfuffle as “related to the Civil Rights Movement” is ludicrous. The civil-rights movement had reached its culmination 44 years earlier, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Up in Connecticut, the New Haven Register noted in an editorial the other day that “Gov. Dannel Malloy and an array of public officials and community leaders stood together recently in a public condemnation of the emergence of a KKK chapter.” The Ku Klux Klan, it seems, is menacing Nutmeg Staters by . . . “distributing leaflets“!
This column certainly has no truck with the KKK, though it seems to us that in this day and age mockery is a more effective tack than condemnation. Then again, humor can be hazardous to a politician, so we totally understand why Malloy struck a serious tone.
And the Register’s own attempt at jocosity proves rather ham-fisted:
Scot X. Esdaile, president of the Connecticut chapter of the NAACP, called this “putting a pink-collared dress on a pig.” That’s an insult to pigs. In fact, an Emory University research project that made headlines Monday found that pigs are as smart and sociable as dogs and other domesticated pets. The hatred spewed by the KKK is not found in your average dog or barnyard animal.
For an example of how to do it right, see our 1999 report on a KKK “rally” in downtown New York.
The Register, however, wasn’t joking when it claimed in the same editorial that “the same basic message that the KKK has promoted for 148 years is embraced by the likes of Ted Nugent, Fox News, Ann Coulter . . . and members of our own community commenting on stories on the New Haven Register’s website.”
That’s a slander against Coulter, who recently wrote a sensitive column about the difficulties of being black in America. It’s also a slander against Fox News, though not atypical of the mainstream media’s treatment of upstart (or formerly upstart) competitors. Nugent, a rock star with a deliberately provocative shtick, hardly seems worth taking seriously enough either to attack or to defend. But the Register’s editorial denunciation of its own customers seems an odd rhetorical strategy, not to mention a poor business decision.
Even more bizarre, two days later the paper’s “group editor,” Matt DiRienzo, published a signed piece in which he repeatedly both apologized for and reaffirmed the editorial’s invidious comparison:
We did not intend to compare Fox News specifically to the KKK and we should have done a better job clarifying that. . . . It was a poor choice of words that created an unfortunate comparison between Fox News and the KKK. We’re sorry for that. . . . We stand by our criticism. . . . There’s no comparing Fox News and the Republican Party to the KKK, and we were wrong in making that connection. But it is mind-boggling that they would help legitimize and give voice to people who are reading from their syllabus.
The headline reads “Editorial on Nugent, Fox News Opens Conversation About Race.” But it’s less like a conversation than a tennis match in a tiny court inside Matt DiRienzo’s brain.
Meanwhile, an editorial in today’s New York Times identifies what the headline calls “The Next Civil Rights Frontier”:
The case involved a child who was anatomically female but began to identify as a boy at an early age, assuming a male first name and wearing boys’ clothes. By the end of fifth grade, the student’s classmates accepted the transformation, but the school district would not let the matter go. Despite warnings from experts that the student should be treated as a boy in all settings, school officials singled him out in ways that brought unwanted attention and made the gender transformation much more difficult.
The child’s parents filed complaints with the Justice and Education departments and the school district was forced to settle.
It does sound as if school officials treated the child with undue cruelty, and it’s possible the “experts” are right as to what is the best–or anyway the least bad–way of accommodating somebody who suffers from such a disorder. But Jesse Jackson’s Selma fixation looks all the more absurd if this is what now passes for “civil rights.”
Then again, maybe the New New New Selma will be a little boy who insists that his name is Selma.
Speaking of racists…
Gee…Charlie wouldn’t have any reason to shift attention elsewhere…
…would he?!? The Race Card: don’t leave home without it; but only if you’re a corrupt Progressive politician rapidly running out airspeed, ideas…and excuses!
And since you can tell a lot about a person by the friends they keep, it’s worth noting…
Charlie Rangel’s Republicans: Chris Christie, Peter King
Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) sang praises to Republicans Gov. Chris Christie and New York Rep. Peter King in an interview with The Daily Beast, released Friday, acknowledging them as “good Republicans.”
“Chris Christie, who is a big Northeasterner, and people only go for Christie because he is reasonable. He says something nice about the president helping out Jersey and now he is on the hit list by Republicans,” the veteran politician said in the interview. “And now my friend Peter King is on their hit list. Peter King, a Republican, is considered a goddamn communist.”
…with whom Charlie identifies.
And as the WSJ‘s Jason Riley relates, the Dims plan on fanning the faux flames of racism well into the future:
Divide (by Race) and Conquer
If you’re wondering what issues Democrats plan to run on in next year’s midterm elections, an article in National Journal on Thursday may be of interest.
“Without President Obama’s name on the ballot, Democrats and civil rights leaders increasingly view voting rights as a rallying cry that could boost minority participation in key midterm Senate races in 2014,” the article explains. “Facing a challenging election landscape in which African-American and Hispanic turnout typically dips, Democrats are seizing on Republican attempts to pass voter identification laws and the Supreme Court’s ruling that Congress rewrite the landmark law protecting minority voting rights.”
In other words, Democrats plan to play the race card.
Never mind that black voter turnout has been rising since 1996 and surpassed white turnout for the first time in 2012, even while states have been implementing voter ID laws. Never mind that the Supreme Court ruling this year on the Voting Rights Act only overturned provisions that were intended to be temporary—and only did so because there is abundant empirical evidence that systemic black voter disenfranchisement is ancient history. If Republicans are trying to suppress the black vote, they are spectacularly bad at it.
Nonetheless, Democrats plan to tell voters that Republican policies are motivated by racial animus. And Attorney General Eric Holder will lead the way. The Justice Department is suing Texas to continue monitoring its election laws, and “the lobbying offshoot of the Obama campaign, Organizing for Action, is alerting supporters about a new ‘voter suppression’ bill in North Carolina, poised to be the latest Republican-led state to require voters to show photo identification,” says National Journal. Party strategists acknowledged that there’s “a political component to the activism.”
At least some on the left are being honest about their motives.
Turning from the racist to the ridiculous, Bret Baier offers proof-positive there’s still plenty of fluff in the federal budget:
The Hoodie
The Smithsonian is interested in obtaining the hoodie worn by Trayvon Martin the night he was killed. The director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History tells the Washington Post, the sweatshirt represents an opportunity to further the discussion about race in America. Last month, George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder in the case.
The Smithsonian also has the handcuffs used when Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested after a report of a break-in at his own home in 2009. That resulted in, of course, the so-called “beer summit” at the White House.
And in International News of Note, America’s chief diplomatic dunce once again defies the facts by suggesting…
Yeah, just like Benghazi was the result of a spontaneous film critique…and Ft. Hood a case of workplace violence.
Moving on to today’s Environmental Moment, submitted for your perusal, yet another rather inconvenient climate truth:
On the Lighter Side…
Then there’s this photo from Carl Polizzi…
…along with today’s entry in the “I’m A Little Teapot” segment:
No word on whether Penney offers matching…
…cups and saucers.
Finally, we’ll call it a day with another titillating tale torn from the pages of the Crime Blotter…
Grandmother admits killing, dismembering Michigan teen who vanished 15 years ago
A detective says a 73-year-old Flint woman admits beating her teenage granddaughter to death with a hammer, then dismembering and scattering the remains 15 years ago. Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton has charged Lois Janish with an open count of murder in the death of 14-year-old Coral Hall. The girl disappeared in 1998 and her body has never been found.
Leyton spokesman John Potbury says the teen went missing after calling a friend asking for a place to stay and saying she’d been fighting with her grandmother. MLive.com reports that Sgt. Greg Hosmer says Janish apologized for dumping her granddaughter’s body.
“Grandma, what great big eyes you have. Grandma, what…hey, what’s with the hammer?!?”
Magoo
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